The Rig Veda: An Anthology

Fire (Agni) is a recurrent motif in the Rig Veda. Like Soma, it is both a god and a material substance. The ritual fire is the centerpiece of the sacrificial rite; it consumes animal victim(s) offered to the gods and receives oblations. In the cremation of the dead, fire is both an awesome flesh-eating force and the medium of purification, enabling new life to appear after the consecration of the burnt body (10.16). Like Soma, the dual nature of fire enables it to mediate between the divine and human spheres, carrying sacrificial offerings to the gods dwelling above. Though fire has a destructive aspect, it also represents the civilized, cultivated, and “cooked” aspects of the sacrificial ritual, as Wendy Doniger suggests (97).

This mediating function works in multiple directions. While Agni is a god living among mortals and interceding on their behalf with other gods, he also brings those gods to the sacrificial ground. In this role, Agni is one of the principle deities in the Rig Veda, presiding over the sacrifice and routinely invoked at its start. This position of priority generates his epithet “mouth of the gods” and the structure of the text. The first hymn in eight of the ten books of the Rig Veda commemorates Agni, and his name appears as the first word of the entire text. As a divine priest and Lord of the Sacrifice, Agni is the father of human priests (1.164). Hymns to Agni identify him with virtually the entire contents of the universe, thus making the clearly demarcated sacrificial ground he presides over a model of the cosmos.

In addition to his sacrificial roles, Agni is honored as the fire of the domestic hearth and is often identified with the sun and the dawn, when the ritual and domestic fires are kindled. An obscure myth (5.2) recounts Agni’s rebirth after having been kidnapped or vanishing; he is thus twice-born, with two mothers. In a related myth, Agni is born from or hides in the waters, a symbolically rich motif that expresses either the affiliation of the divine spark and the unconscious depths, or the conjunction of psyche and matter (2.35; 10.51). The gods must convince Agni to emerge from his hiding place in the waters to carry Manu’s sacrifice to them; Agni’s reconciliation with the gods secures his rightful share in the sacrificial offering and reestablishes the sacred contract between the human and divine. As the embryo of the waters, Agni is identified with the sun, who is also born from (or found in) the depths; both, moreover, are often imaged as a horse or chariot. Agni’s celestial, terrestrial, and oceanic associations further emphasize his mediating function as a messenger between worlds.

Elsewhere, Agni is mythologized as a tender baby, newly born from kindling sticks and quickly growing to consume the parent plants which gave birth to him. Agni was believed to live concealed within vegetation until his flickering birth. Through his connection to the sun, Agni is all-seeing and associated with the king, who similarly stands supreme over all beings. Fast-moving and fierce, Agni is often represented by the horse and bull, important symbols of masculinity. His many names and epithets in the Rig Veda suggest the numerous guises and uses of fire in Vedic culture as well as the complex web of tropes, associations, and symbols surrounding it.

The chariot was an important cultural symbol in Vedic society. An instrument of conquest and mobility, it enabled the Indo-Europeans to expand from their ancestral homeland in western Asia south into Iran and the Indian subcontinent between c. 2500-1000 BCE. In the Rig Veda, the chariot functions as a symbol of sacrifice and the hymn offered to the gods. Poets are chariot-makers, who, through their inspired and artful verse, construct hymns that please the gods and secure their divine favor—the gift of prosperity. In 10.33, the poet-seer imagines himself as a horse harnessed to a chariot driven by Pusan, the gods’ charioteer, carrying an offering to the gods. The poets’ competition for the gods’ favor is akin to a chariot race in which the chariot becomes “the vehicle of good fortune” (67).

Due to its speed, the chariot represents the ascending smoke of the sacrificial fire conveying the burnt offering to divine beings. In some Vedic hymns, such as 1.164, the spoked wheels of the chariot take on cosmic significance, upholding the firmament of the heavens. Many deities are associated with chariots drawn by specific animals. The solar god drives a team of mares in his chariot across the sky; ruddy cows convey Dawn in her vehicle; horses draw Indra; horses, or sometimes a donkey, draw the Asvins. The gods come to the sacrifice in chariots; the image thus symbolizes both the offering made by men to divine beings, and the prosperity and other rewards granted by the gods as recompense. More literarily, the chariot symbolizes the wealth that is the prize of victory won in the chariot race.

The Rig Veda is rich in pastoral symbols and motifs. Primarily, cows function as tokens of prosperity: Won in cattle-raids and chariot races, cows are a fundamental Vedic signifier of wealth. As the giver of nourishing milk, the cow takes on a range of meanings. Speech is a cow whose milk is various forms of utterance. Milk symbolizes the divine knowledge or insight given to poets by the gods. Indra, the giver of poetic inspiration and a quintessentially masculine god, is sometimes a cow whose milk inspires sacred poetry. Soma is mixed with milk in the Soma rite; this is figuratively represented as a bull running into a herd of cows. The prosperity given by the gods is akin to thousands of streams of milk flowing profusely from a cow. The idea of abundance underlies the cow’s intimate relationship to fecundity and procreation.

Many other semantic associations attach to the cow. It is a common symbol of the dawn and, occasionally, of the sun; its feet or footprints are a pun for the “feet” or units of poetic meter. The fertile Earth-Cow, the mother of calves, takes on cosmic significance. Its milk is rain, the seed of heaven. The cow and/or her calves appear regularly as similes in the Rig Veda, and bovine symbolism features prominently in myths about Indra. In the complex creation myth in 3.31, Indra releases the cows from the cave in which they were imprisoned, an image simultaneously alluding to cattle-raids, the releasing of the primordial waters, birth from the womb, the emergence of the sun’s rays, and the liberating power of poetic inspiration. The hymn describes Indra as “the only lord of cows”—the “undying syllables” that give immortality. After his singing frees the cattle, he feeds on their honeyed butter—the milk of creativity and wisdom. The young Indra, Agni, and Soma all appear as calves, occasionally in contexts emphasizing their rejection by the mother.

As counterpart to the cow, the bull is a ubiquitous symbol of virility and sexual potency, associated with Indra, Agni, Rudra, Soma and other gods in the Rig Veda. Indra is described as a bull in many hymns, excited by the sight of cows and striving to win the race to mate with them. Parjanya, the personification of the thundering rain cloud, is a bull who inseminates the earth with vegetation. He is similarly akin to a cow drained of its milk (i.e., rain), and whose calf is the lightning (and/or the fire it sparks). Many sexually explicit Vedic hymns delight in erotic banter in which the amorous play of bull and cow lightheartedly represents human lovemaking. Agricultural metaphors serve a similar purpose: The plowing of fields, the yoking of oxen, and the planting of seed are ubiquitous tropes for sexual intercourse.

The Rig Veda abounds in images of milk, butter, and honey—alimentary substances that symbolize the life-giving qualities of physical and spiritual nourishment. Milk has an extraordinary range of metaphorical associations, as already suggested. In the complex network of Vedic substitutions, it is identified with Soma, fertilizing rains, life-giving waters, life-sustaining fruits of the sacrifice, ambrosia, semen, urine, the dawn, poetic inspiration, and truth. The ubiquitous symbol of life-energy bridging the natural, human, ritual, and divine worlds, milk is a dominant motif in the Rig Veda.

Butter, the product of milk, is the elemental Vedic food substance with symbolic meanings related to, but occasionally different from, those of milk. In creation hymns (e.g., 10.82), butter represents the primeval, chaotic matter from which the cosmos is formed— order churned from chaos. As a food associated with creation and procreation, butter, like milk, is a frequent trope for semen. Butter is the food of the departed ancestors, inferior to the Soma or ambrosia eaten by the gods; elsewhere, however, butter is like Soma and pleases the gods. Butter symbolizes the divinely ordered universe: Sky and earth are enclosed in butter, gorged on butter, and beautiful in butter (6.70). The Child of the Waters, often identified with Agni, wears a garment of butter and eats butter as a kind of sacred amniotic fluid. Butter is intimately associated with the sacrifice, both as a sacrificial offering to the gods and as a metaphor of sustenance and divinity. In Hymn 6.70, sky and earth, imagined as full of butter, are like priests performing the sacrificial rites, offering sweet oblation to the gods as they pour butter onto the ritual fire. Intoxicated by Soma, the inspired words of the poet are streams of butter flowing from the ocean of the heart: One simile describes the poet’s intonations as “waves of butter flow[ing] like gazelles fleeing before a hunter” (4.58; 127). Butter is thus both the sacrificial offering and the transformative, sanctifying effects it produces. Regularly associated with funeral and cremation rites, butter is also a cosmetic for grieving women and the food of the afterlife.

“Honey” is a frequent synonym for Soma in Vedic hymns, or a more general term for the oblation. The word denotes sweetness: Butter flows in honeyed streams and the first pressing of Soma juice is called honey. More specifically, the term denotes the immortalizing quality of Soma, or of ambrosia, the food of the gods. The footprints of Visnu’s three strides are inexhaustibly full of honey, symbolizing the intoxicating power of Soma, the divine presence, in the created world. Visnu’s hidden refuge beyond the world of mortals conceals the fountain of honey—the nectar of immortality. Similarly, the crystalline waters of Varuna drip honey, an image of purity, truth, and divine grace.